Questions And Answers

Main menu

Category Archives: english

I am a first-semester master’s student in my field of study. However, I have a question about applying for funding/fellowship opportunities. For a fellowship that I am interested in right now, which is a foreign language-related one, I need two recommendation letters from professors. I only took the general courses that are needed to satify the mandatory course requirements for my major. I lacked enthusiasm in most of my courses that I took this semester, which led me to not forge close relations with my professors. Is it helpful to ask professors who taught me for a semester for a recommendation letter? Or, is it okay to ask a professor that will teach me next semester? My spring semester begins on January 17th, and the fellowship application deadline is February 1st.

I am in the writing-up stage of my PhD, I have around 8 months to go before submission. I have 4 conference papers (2 IEEE, 1 ACM and 1 in a weak conference). Plus a full paper that got accepted as a poster just tonight. I’m not sure about whether it will be published in IEEE eXplorer (according to previous conferences it should).

Is 5 conference papers an acceptable outcome for a Computer Science PhD student?

Is an IEEE poster publication significant for anything?

This might be off topic (sorry about that), but the reviews I’m receiving are very confusing and the discrepancy is quite high. What is the safest option for the thesis, addressing the reject comments or concentrating on the points made by the accept side (sometimes impossible to do both).

I would like to get a postdoc fellowship grant that is addressed to a specific department (in a particular top-tier university). Now I just need to get a professor there to accept to host me.

While I think that my chances of getting the funding are high, I’ve emailed a professor to ask whether I could work at his lab (with this funding), but got no response after an email a week ago.

I do believe that I’m a good match for the lab and a good candidate to get the fellowship, so… should I call/email this professor to follow-up? Otherwise, is it fine to just email another professor (in the same department)?

Our university asked us to choose our supervisor in next two weeks. So I visited the potential professors’ websites to know about their research interests.

Personally I don’t like computer engineering very much, so I’m seeking for an area which is more connected to other fields, specially in biology and medicine. In available professors’ interests I reached to machine learning and data mining.
What is your advice? Choosing which one is more helpful?

I’m an undergraduate student. I have learned something about research. But in my university currently most professors are working on condensed matter physics, a few AMO. I think I really need someone to guide my career because I can’t get myself interested in condensed matter experiments (especially those to develop new materials or having seldom to do with the “physics things”) for now.

I’m in a biology PhD program, and I’m three years into the process. However, my mentor is small minded, unsupportive, and borderline emotionally abusive. I found this out almost a year into my project after TAing his class for him, where he treated the other TA with a lot of deference and respect but was really aggressive and unkind towards me. When I spoke with him about realizing that microbiology wasn’t my passion, he told me that I should switch labs because this really wasn’t the place for me. At the end of that discussion he said I shouldn’t hold him to the mean things he’d said (which is exactly the kind of emotional abuse I’m talking about).

For a long time I’ve considered switching from wet lab benchwork to computational biology, but am worried that the problem lies within me, and not with the work. Now that I’ve realized that my mentor isn’t going to be of any help, I’m turning towards the internet hivemind. In short, my questions are:

A) What criteria have people used to decide to switch the scope and focus of their PhD projects when faced with an emotionally abusive mentor who has led to the emotional breakdown of at least two, if not more, of his students?

B) what is a good way I can assess if computational work is something I would like/be good at?

This also isn’t something I can easily go to the department with, because the last time I tried to speak with someone they launched an investigation into the lab and so it ended up making my experience much, much harder.

Once I was told that in mathematics after one gets a PhD it is very hard to change a field of specialization afterwords. To what extend do you agree on that? What are the reasons? How common are counter examples?

In your answers please also specify on what country are you talking about if you believe it matters. Thank you.

I am an undergraduate in the U.S., and my university is currently interviewing for an open faculty position. The department arranges lunches with the job candidates and current undergraduate students, where we can ask the candidate questions and get to know them. Students fill out an evaluation of the candidate following the lunch (which is in theory taken into consideration for the hiring decision). However, the atmosphere of this meeting itself is quite informal and conversational.

Two of the candidates are currently expecting a baby. One fellow undergraduate specifically asked the female candidate (in front of 20 other undergrads) if she would be able to balance a new baby and the job at the same time. However, she did not bring this up with the male candidate, who is also expecting a baby. We met with the male candidate first.